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Hey, good morning. Good morning. It's another day at Dateline headquarters in 30 Rockefeller Center.
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Okay, so let's jump in so you can get started on your day. You're listening in as our producers swap tips about breaking crime news,
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trial updates, and stories that could become the next Dateline episode. Still trying to get to the police chief today.
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The actual defendant completely proclaims his innocence. I'm Andrea Canning, and this is Dateline True Crime Weekly.
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It's February 6th, and here's what's on our docket. In Vermont, a group of young people called the Zizians is in the spotlight after two of them get in a deadly shootout with border guards.
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Investigators say the deaths aren't the only ones allegedly tied to the group. Teresa and the young woman who bought her the guns were in frequent contact with a third person, who is a person of interest in another murder, this one in California.
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In Dateline Roundup, prosecutors beef up their indictment against rap mogul Sean Combs.
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And emotions run high at the sentencing hearing for Natalie Cochran, the West Virginia pharmacist convicted of murdering her husband.
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To this day, this vile being has showed no remorse, none whatsoever. Plus, the 1996 murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey is making headlines again.
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We'll get you up to speed on what you might have missed. But first, we're heading to a Los Angeles courtroom where the trial of a woman accused of conspiring to murder her celebrity hairstylist husband is finally underway.
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Monica Sementilli's trial began last week with a gripping two-day opening statement by the prosecution.
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She told the jury the case was a story of lust, greed, and betrayal right out of a Hollywood movie, with Monica at the center.
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You're going to learn about her lies and deception. You're going to hear about her extreme selfishness and ultimately the murder of Fabio Sementili, her devoted husband of almost 20 years.
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The prosecution alleged that Monica and her lover, Robert Baker, plotted to kill Fabio so she could collect $1.6 million in life insurance money.
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The defense countered in their opening statement that it was Baker alone who was the mastermind.
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Robert Baker decided that he was going to kill her husband. No reason that Monica would have wanted, no motive and no interest.
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And that it was Robert Baker who made that choice for her. Baker has already pleaded no contest to the killing and is serving a sentence of life without parole.
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And this week, the prosecution started to present its evidence against Monica, playing audio for the jury pulled straight from investigators' case files.
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Dateline producer Chetna Joshi has been in the courtroom, and she is with us now to tell us what she saw and what she heard.
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Chetna, thanks so much for coming back. Hi. So let's start where the prosecution did, with the 911 call from the couple's teenage daughter who found her father stabbed to death on the patio.
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What did you say? It's tough to listen to, Chetna. What was the reaction like in court as it played?
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Did Monica show any emotion? Yeah, I would say this is the most emotional we've seen her since trial began.
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She was crying, dabbing her eyes. And this audio has almost deeper meaning to it because the prosecution is alleging that it was actually part of Monica's plan for her daughter Isabella to arrive home first and discover the body.
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Right. The state has alleged that Monica, who had been shopping at the time when the murder happened, that Monica knew that Fabio was home alone at that time and that she had passed that information along to her lover, Robert Baker.
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The prosecution also said that during this time, she knew that Isabella was on her way home.
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And so Monica knew that Isabella would have been the one to find her dad dead. Yeah, which the prosecution believes is Monica establishing an alibi.
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Right. Yes. In court, prosecutors also played audio from Monica's first interview with police.
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You came home and then you didn't know anything at that point, right? No. The door was open.
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The drive door was open? And I think that, oh, where do you go? Because of the code?
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Yeah. Chetna, what stood out to you listening to this audio? Monica sounds very emotional. She sounds shocked. She sounds like she's hyperventilating and she
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sounds like she's sobbing. But on the stand, the original detective on the case testified that
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both him and his partner noticed that while she sounded like she was sobbing, there was sobbing, there was visual cues of her being upset, but I did notice there were no tears.
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Now, on cross-examination, that detective said it wasn't something that he had documented in his police report at the time.
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And so I think the defense was trying to point out that perhaps Monica was in such shock, so upset.
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So maybe she didn't cry and, you know, and people grieve differently. They also played in court several of the follow-up calls Monica made to investigators.
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What did those recordings reveal? You'll recall that after the murder, the killers drive away in Fabio's Porsche.
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Christopher Austin and Robert Baker. Those are the two murderers involved in this case. And the Porsche is found a couple days later and detectives find blood in the Porsche.
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And the DNA comes back to Robert Baker They have this information probably a couple weeks into their investigation but they don tell Monica But meanwhile they having these phone calls with Monica and she is asking about the DNA results
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Any about anything back with any DNA, anything? Well, again, that's evidence, so I can't discuss that.
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We have victim, suspect, whatever. If you're looking at it through the prosecution lens, that could be suspicious that, you know,
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does she seem overly concerned about these results? But if you look at it through the defense lens,
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of course, Monica would want to know because she wanted investigators to catch the killer,
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right? But it was a very interesting point that the calls highlighted. There were even more recordings, Chetna, where Monica spoke with the detective about Fabio's
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life insurance claim being held up. And this is, of course, significant because it cuts right to
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the heart of, you know, what the prosecutors say was the motive. Yeah, you can hear Monica raising to investigators that there's issues with her being able to get this insurance, life insurance payout.
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And as the calls go on, it seems as if she's getting increasingly agitated that she can't get the payout.
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Obviously, the prosecution is painting like a very vivid picture through their eyes that, you know, this is all about this life insurance and it's making her look really suspicious.
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But on the other hand, the defense could say, look, she needed the money for her family.
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Yeah. And I think that's a big point for the defense is that Monica had two teenage daughters to support.
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She didn't work herself. Naturally, you would be worried about how you're going to provide for your children.
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When the defense was given the chance to cross-examine the detective, it got pretty tense. In part, the defense's questions focused on Robert Baker, who they contend, of course, was the only person responsible for planning the murder.
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Yeah. So the defense was saying that they knew that Robert Baker was the killer as early as February of 2017.
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Yet they didn't arrest him and they let him walk around for another four months before he was arrested in June.
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And why would you do that? And during that period of time, Robert Baker, who you had every reason to believe was a cold blooded killer, was left on the street.
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Correct? Yes. the focus was on Monica Simantilli at that time. Focus was on building a case, sir.
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Against Monica Simantilli. We wanted to find the truth of what happened, and I believe we did.
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Chetna, wow, this is such a fascinating case all around. Thank you so much. I can't wait to have you back on and hear how this plays out going forward.
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Definitely good being with you. Up next, investigators linked the murders of an elderly man in California,
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a husband and wife in Pennsylvania, and the fatal shooting of a Vermont border guard to a group of young people called Zizians.
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Who exactly are they and what do they believe in? Last May, 21-year-old Teresa Youngblood disappeared.
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She'd graduated from the same private high school in Seattle where Bill Gates and Paul Allen went.
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then started working on a computer science degree. Her parents reported her missing to the police.
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Then, two weeks ago, Teresa suddenly reappeared in a Vermont courtroom. Just one week after 44-year-old Border Patrol agent David Maland was shot and killed
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during a traffic stop in the Northeast Kingdom, one of the women involved in the gunfire that day, 21-year-old Teresa Youngblood, is facing a judge.
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Because David Maland was a federal agent, the killing made national news. And then reporters all over the country started connecting the shooting with other deaths.
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Pennsylvania State Police just released new information in the double murder. One that was shot dead and the other had three bullets.
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That 22-year-old was arrested and charged with murder. Six violent deaths across three different states connected to people Teresa associates with.
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People who, like her, were part of a group some people who know them have called a death cult.
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NBC News investigative reporter Rich Shapiro has been trying to untangle the web of how these crimes are connected.
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He's here to tell us what he's learned. Rich, thanks for coming on the podcast. Sure thing.
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Let's start with what happened in Vermont in the middle of January. Yeah. So what we know from the criminal complaint filed against Teresa Youngblood is that on January 14th, a hotel employee calls law enforcement to say that two people wearing black tactical gear and masks have checked in.
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One of them has a, quote, apparent firearm in an exposed carry holster. That's Teresa.
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Then law enforcement begins to surveil them. Days later, investigators are watching Teresa and the person with her, who we now know as Ophelia Bockholt.
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And they see Ophelia go into a Walmart while Teresa waits in the car. Ophelia comes out with aluminum foil and, while sitting in the passenger seat, wraps objects in the foil.
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That's something people do to prevent their cell phones from being tracked by law enforcement.
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A couple hours later, three Border Patrol cars with lights on pull over the Prius.
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Teresa gets out of the car and stands by the driver's side door. And then, according to the federal prosecutors in Vermont, Teresa drew her Glock and fired at least twice.
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Ophelia tried to draw her weapon, but didn't fire. And at least one Border Patrol agent fired at least seven bullets.
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One of those agents was shot and died at the hospital Ophelia was shot and pronounced dead at the scene and Teresa was also shot but not killed Do we know then if Teresa is the one who killed the Border Patrol agent
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We do not. At this point, Teresa is facing two counts. One is assault with a deadly weapon
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while resisting or interfering with federal law enforcement. And the other is a weapons charge.
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What did they find when they searched the car? They found quite a large collection of tactical gear.
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That included two full-face respirators, gas masks essentially, 48 rounds of hollow point ammunition.
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They also found Youngblood's journal. Did the journal shed any light on why they had all this stuff?
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Not really. In a motion for detention that the federal prosecutor filed last week, the government says that she wrote in a cipher, a code, but they are using Teresa's associations to figure out what she and Ophelia may have been up to more than what was in her journal.
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In the detention document, the prosecutor says that the guns Teresa and Ophelia had on them in the car were purchased by a person of interest in a double homicide that happened in Pennsylvania two years ago.
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And that Teresa and the woman who bought her the guns were in frequent contact with a third person who was a person of interest in another murder, this one in California.
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And the name of that person of interest in the California case is sort of the key to unlocking how all these people connect, right?
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a person by the name of Jack Lasota? Jack Lasota, who also goes by Ziz. She uses female pronouns.
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Is she the common denominator in all of this? Yeah. So it appears through a close read of
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the court documents that Ziz was at the scene or had a connection to people who were involved in
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all of these crimes. So what, Rich, have you learned about Ziz? Who is she? What is her
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background? Yeah, so Ziz is somewhat of an enigma. She's from Alaska. She got a degree in computer
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science. She is very, very serious about veganism. She used to operate her own blog,
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where in one post, she asked someone if they were vegan by saying, do you consume the flesh of the innocent? She would only hire lawyers who are vegans,
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and she attracted followers, for lack of a better word. They lived communally in Vallejo,
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California. They were living on the property of an elderly man, and a number of these people,
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if not all, were trans women. Are we talking about a cult here? So it kind of depends on who you ask. There are people in this community, folks in the Bay Area, who have come into contact with Ziz, and they describe Ziz as someone who is manipulative and preys on a certain type, that being trans women who are socially isolated and open to these kind of big ideas.
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And you, of course, tried to reach Ziz to get her response to that, but didn't hear back. So what do her followers believe?
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The Lasota group, who've come to be known as Zizians, they have some unusual beliefs. And the main one is that each human being is essentially made up of two people. They have two minds. Most people have one good and one bad, and these are in conflict with each other.
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We don't know yet how these beliefs or if these beliefs played any role in what's happened or even why Teresa was driving around Vermont with a car packed full of tactical gear and ammo.
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We don't even know how Teresa met Ziz. But there is one more connection between her and Teresa we haven't talked about, Rich.
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You said earlier that Ziz is a person of interest in a California murder. Tell us about that.
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In 2022, Curtis Lind, who owned the property where Ziz was living, survived a brutal attack by some of the Zizians.
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He was impaled with a samurai sword and lost an eye, but he survived. Ziz has not been charged in the attempted murder, but we know that she was at the scene.
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Curtis Lind, he shot at his attackers and one of them died. So the two surviving attackers were charged with attempted murder and aggravated mayhem.
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Curtis Lind was going to be the star witness at their trial in April. Prosecutors say exactly when Teresa and Ophelia were driving around northern Vermont being watched by the police,
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Maximilian Snyder, Teresa's high school classmate, killed Lind to prevent him from testifying.
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Snyder has yet to enter a plea in that case, and prosecutors have not said why Ziz is a person of interest in Vallejo.
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So where is Ziz? What do we know? We have no idea. Neither do her attorneys or other people I've spoken to who had previously been in contact with her.
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Feels like it's far from over, Rich. There is actually a hearing in the California murder on Thursday and in Teresa's case in Vermont on Friday.
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So there'll be more to come soon, I think. You'll have to come back and tell us what you learned, and our listeners can read your piece about this case, and Ophelia in particular, on NBCNews.com.
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Yes, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Coming up, it's Dateline Roundup. We'll have the latest on the sex trafficking case against music legend Sean Combs.
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Plus, 30 years after the murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey, the investigation gets new life.
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We take a look back to where it all began Welcome back. Joining us for this week's Dateline Roundup is Dateline producer Jay Young. Hey, Jay.
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Hey, Andrea. How are you? Good. For our first story, we're headed to West Virginia for an update on the trial of Natalie
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Cochran. She is the West Virginia pharmacist accused of poisoning her husband, Michael Cochran.
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Jay, you've been following this story for years, and you were in the courtroom every day of this
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trial, which ended last week with a guilty verdict. So, Jay, what is new now? Well, there was a
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sentencing hearing, and it was up to the jury to decide whether Natalie would get a life sentence
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without the possibility of parole, or whether they would give her mercy where she could get parole
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after 15 years. There were some very emotional statements from family members, including Michael's
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mom, Donna, and his best friend, Chris. Michael's one of my best friends. He was a very strong man.
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He's a good man. He loved his family. He took care of his family. He wasn't sick. He wasn't ready to
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To this day, this vile being has showed no remorse, none whatsoever. We, along with our family and friends, have sat quietly and graciously and painfully watched
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and listened as Michael's good name has been murdered time and time again by those who publicly defend this murderer.
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Is Michael Brandon resting in peace? I don't think so. We ask this court that Natalie Cochran be sentenced to life in the state prison
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for the rest of her natural life. So what did the jury recommend? They came back and quickly. It took
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them not much more than an hour, which may be a clue into how strong the jury thought the prosecution's
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case was. And Natalie was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
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For our next story, we've got updates in the case of Sean Diddy Combs, the music mogul who was
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indicted in September on charges of sex trafficking, racketeering, and transportation to engage in
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prostitution. He has pleaded not guilty. Jay, what's new in this? Last week, prosecutors in
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Manhattan federal court added two more alleged victims to the transportation to engage in
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prostitution charge. The new filing accuses Combs of dangling one of the alleged victims from an
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apartment balcony. The indictment also charges that Combs racketeering crimes began in 2004,
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not 2008, so four years earlier than previously thought, and lasted until 2022. Has Combs responded to these new accusations, Jay?
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Well, he has denied them through his lawyer. He's set to go to trial on May 5th.
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For our last story, we've got an update on the case of Jimmy J. Lee, the 20-year-old Ole Miss student who disappeared on July 8th, 2022.
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Last fall, we covered the trial of Sheldon Timothy Harrington Jr., a fellow Ole Miss student who prosecutors allege killed Lee to hide their romantic relationship.
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Harrington has always denied any involvement in Jay Lee's death. The trial ended with a hung jury, and a retrial date is supposed to be set soon.
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Yeah, one of the challenges for the prosecution in the trial was that this was a no-body case.
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Jay Lee had been declared dead, but they didn't know where he was. Over the weekend, human remains were found in a remote area of Carroll County.
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Mississippi Today reported that the remains were found with a gold necklace that had the nameplate Jay Lee on it,
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which matches the necklace Jay Lee wore in pictures posted to social media up to two days before his disappearance.
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So sad. On Wednesday, local police and the Mississippi State Crime Lab confirmed via DNA analysis that the remains belong to Jay Lee.
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Thank you so much, Jay, for these updates. Thanks, Andrea. There is a murder case that has recently been making headlines on social media, the news, TV morning shows.
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And here's what's amazing about that. The case is 30 years old. One of America's most notorious unsolved murders.
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The 1996 case, now the subject of renewed interest on social media. You still have hope that this can be solved.
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I believe it can be solved. I'm talking, of course, about the unsolved murder of JonBenet Ramsey.
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She was just six years old when she was found strangled to death in her family's Colorado home.
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And for years, her family lived with their grief, at times under suspicion themselves.
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Their daughter's death was a media sensation. Everyone in America is watching. But they never got closer to getting any answers until maybe now.
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My next guest, Dateline producer Jessica DeVera, has been covering the story for more than a decade.
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She's here to bring us up to speed on the latest in the case and remind us of what we might have forgotten.
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Jessica, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. So to start, as we mentioned, this case is nearly three decades old.
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Why is it making headlines again now? Netflix recently released a docuseries called Cold Case Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey. The little girl's father, Jon Ramsey, is featured in the docuseries, which centers on his push for authorities to utilize advances in DNA technology to solve the case.
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Last week, Jon met with the new Boulder police chief. He spoke to NBC News correspondent Stephanie Goss shortly afterwards.
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They were just open to sincerely discuss the case. I was just very impressed with the caliber of the leadership now.
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And that gave me great hope. So take us back to those early days, Jessica. This case was an absolute media frenzy back in the 90s.
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I was working at the TV show Extra at the time. It was my first job. They covered the story every single night.
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It was something that everybody was talking about. That is correct. I think people were, you know, there's this little girl on the pageant stage.
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My name is JonBenet Ramsey, and I'm five and a half. And I think people were just really sort of transfixed with that image.
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And a year before JonBenet's murder, the O.J. Simpson trial transfixed the country, right?
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So when JonBenet's murder made headlines, everyone latched on. And there were so many bizarre clues, too, like, robbed people's attention.
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That's right. Yes. Several details to this case that have always been very intriguing,
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like this two and a half page ransom note found inside the Ramsey's home. The note demanded $118,000,
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which was very close to John Ramsey's bonus that year. Handwriting experts were brought in to
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analyze the writing. There was also the garrotte, a loop of cord that was tied to a wooden handle
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that was used to strangle JonBenet. Some crime scene photographs were sold to tabloid newspapers.
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Reporters were hungry for the next big scoop. And of course, everyone wanted the big get
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and wanted to interview JonBenet's parents. Soon after JonBenet murder her parents sat down with CNN to say that an intruder had to have killed their daughter There is a killer on the loose
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If I were a resident of Boulder, I will tell my friends to keep your babies close to you.
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There's someone out there. But then the public started to turn on them a little bit because word got out that they were not talking to the police, but they were talking to the media.
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That is correct. According to the police, the parents were no longer speaking directly to them.
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The family was officially cleared in 2008, but John Ramsey told NBC's Stephanie Goss last week that he thinks the only way to restore his family's reputation is to find JonBenet's killer.
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Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the family has been through a lot, right? And even though the district attorneys publicly announced that they were no longer under this cloud of suspicion, I think that they feel like unless DNA points to the killer, then their name will not be completely restored.
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So John Ramsey as you said Jessica wants DNA evidence tested What specifically is he talking about So unknown DNA was found on several items from the crime scene but a match has never been made
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So he wants to have that further tested because there has been so much advancement in DNA technology, specifically genetic genealogy.
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The police chief said a cold case review board met in 2023 to go over the case. What happened with that?
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So the police chief had an independent group of investigators meet, and they made several
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recommendations. They don't go into specifics because it is an open investigation still, but they have
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been telling the media and the public that they are following up on those recommendations.
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We will be keeping an eye on any developments. Absolutely. Thank you, Jessica. Thank you so much for having me.
00:27:21
One more thing before we go. Monday was National Missing Persons Day. For more than 10 years now, our digital team has covered more than 500 cases in its Missing in America series.
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You might have heard some of them on our Missing in America podcast. Well, this week, you can read about 88-year-old Myrtle Polk who vanished from her Dallas home in June 2024.
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To check out the article and see if you have any information that might help bring her home head to NBCnews forward slash missing in America That it for this episode of Dateline True Crime Weekly
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Coming up this Friday on Dateline, Josh has an all new two hour episode. The murder of a beloved
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tech mogul stuns a city and sends investigators into a world of glamour, parties and rage.
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That is the most far out story I think I've ever heard in my life. I think that there is something deeply disturbing about this person.
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Watch Under the Bay Bridge, airing this Friday at 9, 8 central on NBC, or stream it starting
00:28:27
Saturday on Peacock. Thanks for listening. Dateline True Crime Weekly is produced by Frannie Kelly and Katie Ferguson.
00:28:34
Our associate producers are Carson Cummins and Caroline Casey. Our senior producer is Liz Brown-Kurloff.
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production and fact-checking help by Sarah Kadir Veronica Mazzaka is our digital producer
00:28:46
Rick Kwan is our sound designer original music by Jesse McGinty Bryson Barnes is head of audio production
00:28:53
Paul Ryan is executive producer and Liz Cole is senior executive producer of Dateline
00:28:58
all right thanks everybody